Film Commentary by Alex Good

Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave (2005)

*. I’m a big fan of the zombie genre, but I hate what it turned into. Which is this.
*. It was filmed back-to-back with Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis, with the same director and some of the same cast. And to some extent it’s a sequel, beginning where the former film left off with Peter Coyote’s Uncle Charlie (is this a nod to Shadow of a Doubt?) driving away with one of the Trioxin canisters).
*. But after that initial link any connection is broken. The survivors of Necropolis seem to have no memory of what happened in that film.
*. Either that or they’re complete morons. Which is a possibility. The term “idiot plot” is usually reserved for slasher films, where the victims have to behave in unbelievably stupid ways in order to up the body count. You don’t hear it applied to zombie films as much because the victims would have to be really, really stupid not to be able to outsmart the living dead.

*. Well, here they are that stupid. I suppose there’s something ironic about the zombies jonesing for brains in such an environment, but it isn’t played up. Unless the scene where the zombie bites the cheerleader in the ass — because that’s where her brains are? — counts as ironic.
*. Even the two men in black — who I initially assumed were Russian because of the link to the previous film, but who are later made out to be Italian — are total morons. They tell the kids to be sure to shoot the zombies in the head but repeatedly go for body shots themselves. There’s just no consistency at all. In earlier films we’d been told how the virus only spreads through saliva, but the nerdy girl is infected by a scratch from a zombie’s hand. And so it goes.
*. I called Necropolis a complete piece of shit, and this is no better. It has slightly better gore effects (though they’re still nothing special), but the story makes even less sense. As with Necropolis, none of the attempts at humour work. There’s nothing like the Chernobyl intro. Instead, the main difference is that this movie has tits. Lots of tits.